If you are a person who uses the popular location-based service (aka LBS) called Foursquare you may have noticed every time you check-in (+1 point) or check-in to a new place (+5 points) or add a new place to the database (+5 points) you get points. The more times you check-in each day (a day ends at 3:59am) the more points you get. So even if you have been to a place before if it is your 5th check-in of that day you will get 1 point for the check-in with 4 additional points for the previous check-ins of the day.

Foursquare also has a Leaderboard for each city and among your friends (see below for a screenshot of the top 20 of Toronto’s current list). Each week at 11:59pm on Sunday evening Foursquare resets the Leaderboard. If you have been reading this article carefully you already know how to game the system. If not, don’t worry I got you covered.

Mr Francois G. at the top of the list got an average of 13.23 points per check-in this past week.

Because points build up over the course of a day which ends at 3:59am and the week ends at 11:59am it means there is a 4 hour time period early Monday morning (or Sunday night depending on how you look at it) when all your stops on Sunday at points to your tally for the new week which begins at 12:00am Monday morning because “Foursquare’s Sunday” doesn’t end until 3:59am. So if you have 15 check-ins from Sunday and you check-in to your 16th location on Monday morning at 12:15am you get 16 points for it being you 16th check-in of the day. This also means if you were to check-in to a new location you have never been to before AND you added it to Foursquare’s database you’d get +5 for each of those along with all the other points so that one check-in could end up gaining you 26 points while a lot of other people are sleeping or had lazy Sundays barely going anywhere. Check-in a couple more times and you’ll have 50+ points for 3-5 check-ins.

What is this good for? NOTHING. As far as I know, Foursquare has yet to announce ANY use whatsoever for the points. So, other than bragging rights to your friends which means taking a screenshot of the leaderboard Sunday night or even sending them a message right then to check out your total domination of the leaderboard which is occurring at that very moment you get nothing out of this ‘cheat’. This may be why Foursquare doesn’t really care about fixing this problem.

However, as I am posting this at 11:30pm Sunday evening now is your chance to take advantage of this for this coming week!

Nope I don’t I did for a couple weeks way back when I joined Foursquare but stopped because the points mean NOTHING.
This is why this ‘cheat’ is only good for bragging rights…you can call your friends and wake them up at 4am Sunday night to tell them to worship you because you’re the leaderboard leader out of the whole city.